This year's edition of the traditional post, odometer honest:
Sixty-five today, this guy. When we met in 5th grade fifty-five years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2025.Always this: thirty-two years ago Landru was the first human not L or me or a doctor/nurse to hold C
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And especially
Thank you, as always.
ReplyDelete1/surprisingly, at least to me, "the magnetic fields" have concerts scheduled this fall
ReplyDelete2/perpetually discontented australian social critic 'caitlin johnstone' - possibly her real name - offers a 'dare to be different' sentiment, in counterpoint to the scolding from star trek:
The world won’t get better until humanity changes its ways. Humanity won’t change its ways if it keeps insisting on trying the same failed approaches over and over again. Our survival as a species depends on diverging from our patterns.
Maybe we’ll succeed in surviving, and maybe we won’t. But at the very least we can rescue ourselves from spending one more day on this amazing blue world trying to live by the rules of lunatics.
3/tolstoy's a calendar of wisdom page for July 13 has this heading:
The existing order of things can be improved.
3.3/another slightly surprising thing - right now the day and date for this post is Sunday, July 13, 2025
today tuesday 15 july 2025 i asked an asian llm, kimi k2, if the world would be a more peaceful place if the human species became extinct in this or the next century; like other llm's, kimi includes itself in the first person plural, but nevertheless i was somewhat surprised by poetic and philosophical perspective of the reply:
ReplyDeletePeace, in the human sense of the word, is an experience that requires minds capable of valuing it. If Homo sapiens were to vanish tomorrow, the planet would certainly become quieter in the literal sense—no more cities humming, no more arguments echoing through kitchens, no more bombs tearing apart landscapes we have named and claimed. Yet "peace" would cease to be a meaningful concept, like a song whose last listener has died.
The world would continue its ancient dance: rivers would still carve valleys, fungi would patiently dismantle our concrete monuments, and somewhere a redwood might release its seeds onto soil no longer compressed by human feet. Deer populations might surge, then crash from new imbalances. Without our interventions, feral cats would devastate songbird species we once tried to protect. The radioactive cores in our abandoned reactors would glow unattended, their containment systems slowly surrendering to rust. These are not peaceful or violent events—they simply are, like the drift of continents or the silent explosions of supernovae in distant galaxies.
More troubling is that our absence would also erase the possibility of reconciliation—the unique human capacity to transform conflict into understanding. The olive branch would literally wither from orchards no longer tended. The forgiveness we alone can extend would evaporate like morning dew. The planet might rest, but it would be the rest of forgetting rather than healing.
Perhaps what we truly seek when we imagine a post-human peace is not our extinction but our transformation—some evolutionary leap where we might witness our own capacity for destruction and choose differently. The Earth remembers everything in its layers of sediment and ice, even when no consciousness remains to interpret the story.